CBGLOBE

Where To Get It: www.cbglobe.com

Price: Free

CBGlobe is actually a suite of affiliate tools promoted by Stelios Eleftheriou.

There are three scripts: tower, banner and "portal". The portal is the same as what everyone else calls the Clickbank "mall". It includes the usual directory listing and a search box. You'll find all three varieties somewhere on this page.

CBGlobe: A Box of Goodies

While our main purpose here is to describe ad feeds that help you monetize your website with ClickBank products, CBGlobe treats ad feeds as just one of several tools to make money. So we'll spend a little time describing what is available, and get back to CBGlobe's ad feeds.

So first there are the ad feed plugins in the form of a vertical tower or horizontal banner, and the iframe'd portal page with search box. These will be covered below.

Then there is a set of twelve 2tier and residual affiliate products (including the venerable Site Build It, Shawn Casey, Yanik Silver and others). You can update your current affiliate id's for these programs, or you can join any you want.

You can give away CBGlobe portals (with your own affiliate link) by sending them to your own. Your portal will be a page populated by image and text ads for ClickBank products, and centered in the middle is the ClickBank product directory and search box. At the top are links for member login, visitor signup, and an article directory. The article directory shows a number of unpopulated topics, so that's another opportunity.

You will have a tool to rotate banners. If you have banners from, say CPA Empire or ModernClick or other affiliate sites, you can use this tool to generate a script that will rotate those banners on your website pages.

You can download a zipped file of promotion tools that includes a website template, a rebrandable pdf, a Windows exe file to do the branding, and instructions for branding.

You will end up with two links - one to your CBGlobe portal page, and one for the giveaway page.

There's also a URL Rotator, Hit Tracker and Viral Article Syndication, which won't be covered so we can finally get back to the ad feeds.

Back to Business

As you can see, the ads look pretty good. There is a definite border around each complete ad, and there is no truncation. If you specify a tower of ten ads (the max), you get ten complete ads. Top Notch.

Admin Panel

When you log into the admin panel (which is for operating the tools mentioned above) you can generate the code to create the tower and banner ad blocks and the product directory/searchbox combo. Just click the link for text ads and you'll go to that window. You'll see a dropdown box that lets you select any product category or subcategory, then a box for keywords; a menu for ad format (banner or tower), one for number of ads (1 to 10) and finally color selection for top bar, border and background. You'll notice there aren't options for ad block formats beyond the tower and banner, or font size, face or color. Very basic.

There is a "color picker" link that opens a small window showing the table of 216 "safe" colors. Make sure the window is tall enough to see the code box below the pallette area. Click on a color and a small box shows the HEX value for that color. Select the text in that box, and paste (or type) it into the form for top bar, border or background color.

You'll notice the top bar of the horizontal or vertical ad block contains the link "CB Globe," which is always rendered in white. So if you want to color coordinate the ad block with your site, you may need to pick an alternate color if the color-of-choice is too light to see the text. Of course, you could turn the bar white, which will completely hide the link. But if someone clicks in that area of the bar, off they'll go... That link, of course, will be automatically populated with your affiliate ID.

Modifying the Code

You can't just change parameters at the admin panel and expect that to show up on the web page. Instead you can go in to the admin panel and create a new ad block using different parameters, or you can edit the script yourself. There are very few parameters that can be changed anyway: table column width, top bar, border and background colors, and number of ads are in plain text that can be modified with an editor.

The portal/searchbox script can be likewise modified. The height parameter for the example on this page had to be lengthened a little to prevent a vertical scroll bar.

Positives
- Very good-looking ads.
- No truncated ad text.
- Very basic. Even sweating you can't screw it up.
Negatives
- No control for font face, size or color.
- No spidering.
- No dynamic format changes; user must edit script and upload changes.
- Can't change color of top bar link.